Help Me Pick a Book for Nexus Reads
My faith community is doing Canada Reads style plugs for the 2022 summer reading season
I, along with a few other folks, have been asked to plug a book as a part of the Nexus Reads summer reading season. The community has never done this before, so it will be interesting to see the kinds of books are brought forward. Already, on the first Sunday of pitches, five Nexus leaders, including pastor Brad Watson, all pitched nonfiction books, which were all fairly heavy in nature. This caused me a fair bit of consternation as I had intended on sharing a fairly heavy nonfiction book myself.
When I agreed to pitch a book, I was clear that I would be pitching something nonfiction in the general fields of philosophy, religion, politics, and sexuality.
In other words, Dinner Table Don'ts! 😀
But there are so many good books out there, that it's hard to pick just one. So I thought I would turn to you, my dear readers, and give you five books that I'm considering pitching on May 29th. I would be pleased as punch if you where to leave me a comment, tweet me at @pfthurley, or a message about which one of the five you think choose.
While this piece is available to all subscribers, free and paid, I would encourage you to take advantage of a 7 day trial of all my paid work, available until the end of May. I promise that I won’t be hurt if you choose not to continue after the trial is over, though I would, of course, deeply appreciate your continued support. As a disabled writer, every little bit helps.
The Right to Sex - Amia Srinivasan
First up is Amia Srinivasan’s book The Right to Sex. This book is a fascinating critical romp not only through the patriarchal and misogynistic notions of sexuality that still pervade our still-essentially Christian culture, but also of the ideas and tactics of an evolving 21st century feminism. It’s made up of 5 essays that are both interrelated and stand-alone pieces, along with a Coda formed of point-form observations. A lightly edited version of her essay on the nature of consent and its application in the sexual relationships of professors and their students appeared in the New York Times in September, 2021:
I have used these pronouns — “he” for the professor, “she” for the student — deliberately. To be clear: It is no less a failure of good teaching — what I would call a pedagogical failure — for a female professor to sleep with her students, male or female, or for a male professor to sleep with a male student. The same goes for nonbinary professors and nonbinary students. In all these cases, I would suggest, the teacher betrays the purpose of the classroom. But any argument about consensual teacher-student sex misses something crucial if it doesn’t observe that these relationships typically involve male professors sleeping with female students. In the majority of cases, then, the professor’s failure isn’t just a failure to redirect the student’s desire toward its proper object. It is also a failure to resist taking advantage of the fact that women are socialized in a particular way under patriarchy — that is, in a way that reinforces patriarchy.
The feminist writer Regina Barreca, speaking to female professors, asks, “At what point … did the moment come for each of us when we realized that we wanted to be the teacher and not sleep with the teacher?” Her point is that female students tend to interpret the feelings aroused in them by their professors as feelings of desire for the professor. Male students, meanwhile, tend to interpret their feelings toward their male professors as they are socialized to do: as a desire to be like them.
How Fascism Works - Jason Stanley
Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale University who has made a name for himself over the past few years as a public philosopher speaking out about the dangers of fascism creep. An expert in propaganda with a direct connection to the Holocaust, Stanley’s book How Fascism Works outlines in readable format some of the important things to look out for as our society creeps ever further towards authoritarian fascism. While I wanted to recommend Hannah Arendt’s tome on Totalitarianism, that book is definitely not summer reading; Stanley’s book takes many of the important lessons Arendt speaks about and renders it digestible so that the average citizen can tell the signs for themselves. In light of the racist mass shooting of Black people just outside of Buffalo motivated by the so-called ‘Great Replacement Theory’ it is especially important to highlight his chapter on Victimhood:
Fascist politics covers up structural inequality by attempting to invert, misrepresent, and subvert the long, hard effort to address it. Affirmative action at
its best was designed to recognize and address structural inequality. But by falsely presenting affirmative action as uncoupled from individual merit, some of its detractors recast advocates of affirmative action as pursuing their own race- or gender-based “nationalism” to the detriment of hardworking white Americans, regardless of evidence. The experience of losing a once unquestioned, settled dignity—the dignity that comes with being white, not
black—is easily captured by a language of white victimization.
The Consolations of Philosophy - Boethius
Short and dense, this book was written in 523AD by the very well-to-do Boethius, who lost his position of power as Chief Advisor to King Theoderic, who was at the time the King of Ostrogoths and the most powerful man in western Europe. His sons, having been installed as Senators, were stripped of their ranks and were thrown into prison; Boethius himself dies in prison soon after writing this book. Prison literature is always interesting because it is always laden with grief, disappointment, frustration and sadness. This book is no exception. As if having a conversation with the personification of Philosophy herself, Boethius interrogates her about Lady Fortune. How is it that someone who had it all could lose it all in the blink of an eye? What does it say about that person and their relationships with the outside world? What about their relationship with themself? Luck is a fickle mistress, and the Wheel of Fortune keeps turning, shining upon some, while looking upon others with disdain, before circling around to to heap contempt on those she shone brightly for, just moments ago. One of the most fascinating elements to this book is that even though we know that Boethius was a devout Christian, he never once mentions God.
The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon
Shifting now from non-ficton to fiction, I’m going to end with two Canadian authors. The Golden Mean, which was a finalist for the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize, is a fun re-imagining of what life may have been like for the great Greek philosopher Aristotle, who was charged by Phillip I of Macedon to tutor his son Alexander. Like a typical boy, Alexander was interested in war, but what he was interested in most was seeing the world.
[During lessons] … I speak of the saltiness of the sea, and this too I relate to the body; for even as food goes into the body sweet and leaves a residue in the chamber-pot that is salty and bitter, so do sweet rain and rivers run into the ocean and disperse, leaving a similarly salty residue. I don't tell them I struck on this analogy after tasting my own warm piss. We spend a happy morning observing the flow of a river, while I tell them of the great under ground reservoirs that some believe are the source of all the water in the world. Always Alexander, when I speak of geography, asks about the East, and I oblige with accounts I've read of Egypt and Persia. His eyes go shocked when I speak of the river that flows from the mountains of Parnassus, across which the outer ocean that rings the entire world can be seen.
"I'll go there," he says.
I speak of the Nile, and Alexander says he'll go there too. Once, when I'm speaking of salt and silt and the filtering of sea water, I explain that if you took an empty clay jar, sealed its mouth to prevent water getting in, and left it in the sea overnight, the water that leached into it would be sweet because the clay would have filtered the salt. "You've tried this?" Alexander asks.
"I've read of it."
This exchange stays in my mind, though. Every time Alexander swears to visit some distant place, and Hephaestion swears he'll go there too, and the others dutifully swear that they, too, will join the the ocean, company, I think of that jar bobbing in the ocean, the one I've only read of.
The boy Alexander would eventually combine his wanderlust with his love of war, conquering most of the known world and becoming known for 22 centuries hence as Alexander the Great.
The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant - Mavis Gallant
Finally we have something a bit different, a collection of short stories. I found this book hidden on the shelves at Second Look Books in downtown Kitchener, right across the street from where Nexus meets. I first heard an interview on CBC news with Montreal native Mavis Gallant in 2012 while driving home from Guelph one night. She spent most of her life living and writing in Paris, France, and yet is considered to be one of Canada’s greatest literary minds. Passing away just two years after I heard the interview, she left a legacy of short stories that belongs in the Canadian canon with Alice Munro’s tales about Huron County, Ontario. Gallant’s stories, by contrast, were mostly set in Europe, and frequently tell the tales of ordinary people looking to make it through the European battlefields of the 20th century. A mainstay of my summer beach reading, this thick book is not as daunting as it looks, containing 52 different stories to choose from divided up into sections pertaining to both time period and character development. Covering her entire career, this collection of stories will keep you enthralled well into the night.
What ultimately convinced me to buy the book was a short quote on the back of the book from Gallant herself, about how a reader should consume short stories. Given then-undiagnosed ADHD, it made sense why it grabbed me so:
“Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after the other, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Stories can wait.”
And so, during the summer, I always return to Mavis Gallant, just flipping the book open, almost certain to land on a story I haven’t yet read. And then I am lost…
So which book should I pitch to Nexus on May 29th? Feel free to leave your vote in the comments, or to send me a personal note at peter(at)peterthurley.ca with your thoughts!
While this piece is available to all subscribers, free and paid, I would encourage you to take advantage of a 7 day trial of all my paid work, available until the end of May. I promise that I won’t be hurt if you choose not to continue after the trial is over, though I would, of course, deeply appreciate your continued support. As a disabled writer, every little bit helps.